Fulvio Orsenigo | While you weren’t here

The measures taken to contain the spread of Covid 19 have caused non-ordinary conditions that have affected everyone’s lives. The perception of our usual world changed suddenly and along the deserted and silent streets we came across the unthinkable. The pandemic opened a breach in our habitual patterns, and through it we were able to take a look at what had remained invisible until then. In Venice, as in other cities, the outer space empties and a strange silence falls over the city: the silence of man. In the calm water appears the upturned image of the great palaces, the modest houses, the clouds in the sky; not even the elders remember this disappeared city that now re-emerges from the bottom of the lagoon. If in the daylight the upturned image appears clear, sometimes festive, certainly unusual, it is the night that reveals all its power. Fragile fracture separating the black abyss of sky and water, the solid reality of brick and marble appears to be based on an immaterial image whose memory was lost. The immobility allows a clear perception: in the water a second perfect image appears, otherwise refracted into a thousand waves and reflections. The canals no longer just comfortable streets but vital flow that feeds and purifies the body of the city, reveal an original image without which the project that has shaped and built it for over 1000 years is nothing but a crazy hieroglyphic. In these unusual circumstances the coexistence of the image projected on the sense organ and the finished image as it appears to us, reunites what had been separated and reconnects what had been broken by the disappearance-forgetting of the original image.